SA 2008-2 JOURNEY

JOURNAL : November 18 to December 5

Part 6: November 24, 2008 : Tygerberg and Muizenberg

much abbreviated and expurgated -especially where original was illegible

In the morning, I was transfered to a room inside the villa, looking out over the pool and situated on a hallway with two other rooms; the amazing thing
was that the hallway had a door separating it from the rest of the villa, and had a prominent sign above that door stating: "Toilet."
I called the office of the attorneys my niece had recommended to handle the conveyance of our Paarl house and arranged to meet their representative
in their "easy to find" branch in nearby Bellville on Tuesday morning. I also struggled with hotmail which only sent out every third message, and with the cell phone which Desre had loaned me;
the B and B owners were most surprised to find an American without what every black and colored boy and girl here deemed life's most urgent necessity...
I did google the Cape Flats and False Bay and later that afternoon took a drive there via Mandalay, taking along for lunch a bottle of full cream milk for R 8.90.
It was a bit harder than I thought to reach the actual shore past the local dunes, cottages and camps. Once I got there, it was fairly empty and breezy, with only a few colored firhermen subject to intense scrutiny of ventureful seagulls.
I chatted with one elderly Malay who told me that he had preferred living in the old "Apartheid" days with its open discrimination as opposed under the present black rule
which was supposedly not discriminating...draw your own conclusions.

I decided to drive along the coast of False Bay along Baden Powell Blvd to Muizenberg, with as main distractions one roadside hooker, at least three police cars, and numerous spots where the highway had been
subject to severe coastal erosion. In Muizenberg, I parked the car and walked around a bit, noticing its hippy and surfing culture and an old lady sitting in an abandoned armchair in the shade of a tree and in front of a high securuty wall.
A Cybernet cafe charged R 10 per half hour.
After a long wait on account of road construction, I drove on along the coast and its small villages nestled against the mountains, through Kalkbay as far as Fishhoek where I parked and then walked to a Fish Restaurant - where they only served canned tuna sandwiches....
to my consternation and condemnation.
I almost went to their neighbors, a German knackwurstery, catering to the many German tourists, but instead ordered a ham and cheese sandwich and a coffee milkshake.
I took another route back past the controversial Koeberg Nuclear Power Plant and got almost lost near Goodwood, but made it back to the Tygerberg Villas for a late afternoon dip in the pool with its scary sea-anemone-like crawling
cleaning machine.